TACOMA, WASH. — The University of Puget Sound has officially launched its comprehensive fundraising campaign, Greater, We Ascend, marking a significant milestone in its nearly 140-year history. The announcement was made during a dynamic evening event during Homecoming & Family Weekend, with a goal of raising $150 million.
It didn’t quite work out how I planned: At the end of the week, I found out I hadn’t matched with my preferred houses. But I muddled through the rest of the semester and started to find my footing. Despite some lingering disappointment, I tried again during fall rush my sophomore year.
The smell of hazelnut filling my nose as I clutched my morning latte on the way to class. The din of lacrosse practice sneaking through the glass of my Phibbs Hall dorm window. The feeling of damp wool socks sliding around inside my Birkenstocks. The calming, omnipresent sight of ivy blanketing the campus as if it were protecting us from the outside world. Puget Sound was a beautiful bubble from the harsh realities that lay ahead. It was, in the truest sense, how it felt to be safe.
I was thrilled to get a job there as a sophomore, first as a French tutor and then — by my junior year — as a writing advisor. I could not have anticipated how holistically the CWL would change my life. In our first semester as employees, tutors were required to take an additional course that taught us about potential internal biases, ways of learning, and methods or meeting people where they are in their academic journeys so that we could best serve as many students as possible.
KUPS, Puget Sound’s nationally recognized campus radio station, has always had a countercultural streak, playing music well outside the Top 40 and giving airtime to voices you don’t typically hear on commercial radio. So, it may come as no surprise that the station itself arose from a prank. In the spring of 1966, first-year Rockwell Smith ’69 and a few co-conspirators hijacked the carillon system — normally used to broadcast the sound of bells — to play seven-and-a-half minutes of sound effects, including a cacophony of train whistles and car horns.
Dear Loggers,
Welcome to this special issue of Arches. As you flip through these pages, you’ll find a vibrant celebration of the traditions, people, and places that make the University of Puget Sound so deeply special to all of us. Whether it’s the crisp autumn air under the giant sequoia, the hum of collaboration in Collins Memorial Library, or the lifelong bonds formed in our residence halls, we all have our own unique list of what we love about this remarkable place.
When I walk across campus, I am often reminded of the generations of Loggers who have shaped this remarkable university from its earliest days to the present. Some of their stories are preserved in the names of our buildings and gathering spaces, others in the pages of Tamanawas and The Trail, while countless others live on through the relationships they forged, the lives they touched, and the example they set.
The University of Puget Sound celebrated another year of inspiring philanthropy, with nearly 3,600 donors giving $22.1 million in fiscal year 2025–26. The Puget Sound community came together to support the university and advance its mission of providing a transformative liberal arts education that offers students experiential learning opportunities, expands access to education, and inspires a lifelong love of learning.
